Similarly, somevideogames involve collecting as many distinct, unique soldiers for your army as possible. Other video games, such as fighting games, start with just a few characters but keep adding characters to the roster as more sequels come out, until you eventually have enough characters to populate an entire 'verse.

Please note that this is for extreme examples of regularly occurring characters. It's really not all that uncommon for a story to have ten or fifteen characters, especially with a Villain of the Week format.

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Advertising

Orangina itself already have a bunch of characters in their commercials, but they have many models (mostly female) in their website (although their old website had MORE females, including a female penguin!).

GEICO cycles between so many mascots, it's become ridiculous. The have their eponymous Australian gecko, the googly-eyed stack of money, the offended cavemen, Michael Mc Glone the spokesman, the guitar playing duo that are always spouting hyperbolic comparisons and Max the anthropomorphic pig.

Scott Pilgrim, definitely. The third volume even included a diagram of the 30-odd characters and their relationships to each other.

The Legion of Super-Heroes comic has even more characters than its animated counterpart. Over the entire run, there have been more than 80 distinct members of the team. Because of frequent continuity reboots, who is actually on the team varies from time to time but the core group is generally the size of 20-30 or so members at any time.

They aren't called the "Legion" for nothing

And since the recent mini-series is called "Legion of Three Worlds", well, you do the math...

Hilariously spoofed in Valentino's Normalman, where the Roll Call for the "Legion of Superfluous Heroes" has to be spread out over several whole issues!

The post-Infinite CrisisJSA roster grew to Legion-sizes at the end of Geoff Johns' reign, as countless Legacy Character-types were drawn from the ether. The new writers eventually split them into two teams to properly write them. It got even crazier when the two teams were reunited under Marc Guggenheim, and several other new characters like Manhunter Ri, and Libery Belle were added to the cast. At that point, Guggenheim ReTooled the team into a literal society of superheroes living in the city of Monument Point.

The X-Men have so many characters that there's two separate books just for the core team, another one for the Junior Team/Reserves, and when you get into the various spin-off groups...

For a better understanding, just look at the gatefold cover of X-men #200, which features everyone who had been part of the core team, even those who only hung around for a year or so.

That's actually the main reason behind M-Day. The people who did it felt that there were getting to be too many super-powered people in the Marvel Universe.

Matt Fraction brought up as many mutants he can to the new X-Men base, Utopia island. Not only all X-Men members, their students, New Mutants, his original creations and characters he brought back from the death or Comic-Book Limbo but even Magneto and... Namor. One wonders why, as he clearly crossed the line and cannot handle so much of them (it's doubtful that anybody would), yet brings back many other ones.

There are currently eight separate X-Books in the aftermath of Schism. Three books deal with the Jean Grey Academy alone.

Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog's character roster, taking from both the games, the TVseries and original characters, number in the triple digits. However, thanks to a heaping dose of Screwed by the Lawyers, most of the original characters have been jettisoned from the comic, bringing down the number significantly.

It seems that the number is climbing back up in the wake of reboot. While all the characters from the games and most from the TV series stayed on, new original characters are being introduced consistently, leading to several new groups of freedom fighters and factions working under Eggman, and that's not even counting the sudden introduction of even more obscure game characters such as Honey the Cat and Wendy and the Witchcarters.

The Avengers have issued "Avengers Assemble" calls to the entire roster several times, resulting in anywhere from 30 to 100+ members showing up. After Heroes Reborn, when the team was assembled to fight Morgana, the issue after showed 30 Avengers attempting to take down one B-list villain, with disastrous results. Typically these assemblies also show one-time Avengers Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, or the Fantastic Four making an excuse not to tag along. (Although Spider-Man later became a full time member)

This was lampshaded in one short "What If?" story, ''What if Everyone Who Had Ever Been an Avenger Stayed an Avenger". In the story, Avenger's Mansion was so full of superheroes that one couldn't swing a dead Skrull without knocking down a dozen or so of Marvel Comics finest.

Jonathan Hickman's team has a similarly huge cast, to the point that they had to launch a second title, Avengers World, just to give more screentime to some of the underused players.

Usagi Yojimbo had a big group photo of all its featured characters (good and evil, living and dead) as of vol. ~15, roughly about three-dozen characters.

Batman Probably has the largest cast of villains, allies and supporting characters of any one superhero. He's perhaps the ultimate Ineffectual Loner.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman built up an impressive cast over the years. Dream himself has six siblings and over half a dozen recurring servants. that's not getting into the recurring humans, Faeries, Gods angels and demons.

The Western record probably goes to the DC and Marvel universes themselves, as evidenced by various Crisis Crossover events. Crisis on Infinite Earths put together every version of every major hero at once while throwing in a couple of unique characters. That's just counting the main story line, side stories eventually pulled in virtually every single character in DC history. Ultimately, Crisis on Infinite Earths had almost every DCU character who had their own series ever.

ElfQuest characters all have distinct personalities and appearances, and varying, unique, pretty outfits.

Disney Comics hits this trope pretty hard; just the family trees of Mickey, Donald Duck, and Goofy alone are really big, and the long number of other supporting cast members...

Though only a dozen or so hold any real bearing on the plot, most of them just exist for giant group shots of people fighting.

If villain rosters qualify, Spider-Man has a Rogues Gallery a hundred times as long as Doc Ock's arms. (Admittedly, there have been a lot of Legacy Characters). Remember that Spidey villains like to form a team called Sinister Six? When Marvel announced there's going to be a story titled "Sinister 666", many believed it will be Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

You don't need to specify just the villains — as stated on his main page, Spider-Man has aggregated such a huge supporting cast over the past 50-odd years that every named character in The Spectacular Spider-Man is a supporting cast member or adversary from some point or another. And it's just scraping the surface.

Gotham Central has between eight and who knows how many major, recurring, or named minor characters in each issue. And that's not counting the villains who pop up from time to time. This happens because it follows two shifts of the Major Case Unit at the Gotham Police Department, and each shift has eight detectives and a shift commander.

DC Comics' World War II-based All-Star Squadron consisted of every DC and Quality Comics (a publisher eventually acquired by DC) hero from the 1940s, plus all newer DC characters established as having been active at the time. The ASS had upwards of 75 members (though a good number of them only appeared in cameos or at occasional full-roster meetings.)

Even excluding one-shots and background cameos, the lack of a single main character/team (along with the Cryptic Background References and Continuity Nods) causes Astro City to have several dozen characters with regular appearances scattered throughout the series' run. This is especially true in extended story arcs like "Tarnished Angel" and "The Dark Age", which often star characters who only get a brief appearance in other stories.

Pride High has its reader characters on its message boards, which has more characters than one may be willing to count — and many of these have made cameos in the comic itself.

Love and Rockets, particularly the Palomar stories, which follow the intertwining lives of residents in a small town and their descendants.

The Knight and Squire miniseries from DC Comics featured dozens and dozens of new British heroes and villains, both currently and retroactively. Most of them were identified in annotations added in the trade paperback release.

Afterlife with Archie features many and many main and supporting cast member from the Archie universe. Just in the core group, we have Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, Kevin, Cheryl and their family, which would bring up the tally to roughly 8-10 characters. And that doesn't count Jughead, who was Patient Zero of the zombie apocalypse and the leader of the zombies. The series even made an effort to pull out obscure characters such as the Lodge's butler Smithers, Jughead and Betty's sister Jellybean and Polly, Nancy and Ginger (who are Promoted to Love Interest to each other) and even from different titles such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and even Josie and the Pussycats.

Comic Strips

Large casts are especially rare in newspaper comics, due to new papers constantly picking up the series and almost no reruns to catch up with, but Doonesbury is a famous exception. At one time a Sunday strip ran that was just one big panel with a group-photo-style picture of the entire cast. Along the side of the panel was a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style chain of how they are connected to one another.

A previous strip, published about five years earlier, Lampshaded this by doing a similar chart and having Zonker explain that this was being done because "most 19th century Russian epic novels have fewer characters than this feature." Since then, the cast has only GROWN (as this was before everyone started having kids.)

This was lampshaded in the comic strip Foxtrot once. A tossed-off gag in the middle of a Sunday strip involved Jason downloading the cast list of Doonesbury, and the file was many megabytes in size.

If Crybaby Boobie and Molly Volley count as "principal characters", then so does Roy, the kid who introduced Peppermint Patty to Charlie Brown. He appeared in quite a few summer camp strips. And what about the pig-tailed girl who's friends with Rerun?

A complete list of all the characters is here. Oh, and that's just the named cast members.

The core of the cast is probably Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, Woodstock, Sally, Peppermint Patty, and Marcie. Due to the strip's Long Runner status, the core of the cast has evolved as it's gone on. Shermy, Patty, Violet, Pig-Pen, Frieda, Franklin, Rerun, and Eudora have been members of the core, or at least the main cast, at some point or another; a case could also be made for 5, Roy, Spike, and Rerun's aforementioned friend. That's 17-21 main cast members, a pretty remarkable tally, though no more than ten or so at any one time.

Tumbleweeds has a good thirty characters in its main cast, split between members of the town and the surrounding lands' Native tribes.

For Better or for Worse has a core family of five, plus friends, relatives, and pets. And then the kids started having families of their own...

Mutts started as just a man and his dog, then added a couple with a cat. Several dogs, many cats, an array of invertebrates and other animals, and a few humans later, it definitely qualifies.

Gasoline Alley is unusual in being a Long Runner where the characters have aged in real time. In that time, many castmembers have died, new ones have kept getting introduced, baby Skeezix is now an old man, and Walt Wallet, the original protagonist, is now over 100. The cast is very big, and long stretches can go by without Walt or Skeezix popping up, although together they are still both the heart of the strip.

Fan Works

Origins, on account of being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover, has this in spades. By the author's count, over 200 characters are named, and most either had a plot impact in Fractured, have one in Origins, or are carryovers from canon.

Though probably not as many characters as some other examples on this page, Kyon: Big Damn Hero probably fits; featuring almost the entire cast of Haruhi Suzumiya (including minor characters and even background characters only mentioned in the supplemental materials), most of the cast of Higurashi: When They Cry, and a bunch of OCs thrown in for good measure.

The Still Waters Series, based on Mahou Sensei Negima!, comes packed with dozens of characters already; the author saw fit to add more. The third story in the series currently has one hundred characters, canon and original, on its character sheet.

What About Witch Queen? utilizes Anna, Elsa, Kristoff and Hans from Frozen and throws in at least thirty five named characters for a good measure. Moreover, it's sometimes hard to say whether a new character is a one-shot, a new regular cast member or a one-shot who's really a Chekhov's Gun. Some of those from the last category can return after twenty chapters of absence.

The Harry PotterFan Fic series Witches' Secret eventually ends up with a core harem of hundreds, and an extended one of thousands. The Owls, Dragons, Horses, and other animals.

Tiberium Wars has loads of characters, to the point where the author has hinted that he has a separate text document just to handle force organization. The only thing keeping it from getting too mind-boggling is the fact that the author gleefully kills characters left and right.

The Avatar: The Last AirbenderFan FicThe Order of the Avatar Slayer starts out by throwing about 15 characters out to the readers in the first 10 chapters. By the end of the series, there's a total of at least 60 or 70.

What Lies Beyond the Walls introduces at least thirteen named characters in the first chapter (who don't die in the first chapter, that is). And from that point on, more and more named characters are thrown at the readers, to the point where even the characters themselves don't remember them all.

Any massive crossover, especially if the author tries to put every character from every source that is being crossed over. One insane example is Lonely Souls, a crossover of Ranma ˝, Urusei Yatsura AND Sister Princess, complete with most of the main cast of each, plus countless minor characters as well.

The Batman fanfiction Cat Tales encompasses not only Batman's cast (rogues, heroes, and civilians alike), but at times the DC universe. Every named Batman character from the animated series or comics at least makes a minor appearance, with almost every rogue or member of the Batfamily getting to star in at least one story. As all of the rogues hang out at the same bar (the Penguin's Iceberg Lounge), it's inevitable that they're all going to show up eventually.

Beyond the Dawn, extremely huge Russian Tolkien fiction, based on Beren and Lúthien story. Author had not only developed the original Tolkien characters, who were nameless or briefly mentioned in the original story (11 companions of Finrod, Beren's mother, elven maidens from Lúthien's suite, warriors of Fingon, Maedhros and Thingol, Boldog the orc, even several Sauron's wolves gained names and personalities), but invented her own characters: Beren's squire Gili, knights of Angband, Dortonion highlanders, elven captives and so on.

After Ren and Pin-Mei, and Horo-Horo and Rong have families in A Gift Of Love, there are effectively 9 main characters. Add in extended family, spirits, bodyguards, friends and classmates, teachers, villains, ancestors, and estranged family members. Now you have over fifty.

Breakaway, the first installment of the BLoSCFan VerseFor Good, introduces an OC protagonist and just a couple of supporting females throughout the first few chapters... and then the story hits Chapter 10 and turns into a Next-Gen Fic. Enter three Action Girl stars and four male soldiers... and the distinct possibility of more cadets on their way.

There are at least 90 named characters to keep track of in The Tainted Grimoire. Clan Gully alone has 9 members as of this writing, 10 if you count Gull the Chocobo. Then, there are all the other clans, the people Clan Gully helps, and their enemies.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Forever has over 60 characters, consisting largely of originally-created characters but also including approximately 22 characters from the canon series who are either recurring supporting characters or who are given brief cameos...and that's without taking into consideration the number of characters in the story's now-discontinued sequel.

The pro wrestling story, A Ring Of Their Own, features or mentions virtually every decent female professional wrestler of the 2000's.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, and its side stories have 72 named characters from all the Kamen Rider Shows involved and lots of OC characters, major and minor that each have a small part to play in the whole universe.

Boys Und Senshado not only has the entire and sizable cast of Girls und Panzer, but it has many original characters. 16 boys join Oarai's tankery team, and there are several other teams.

In fact, the one artist who drew all of them even said that it took him six monthsnote That's half a year. to finish it.

Necessary To Win, a Girls und Panzer and Saki crossover, found here, has five to ten Saki characters at each of the major schools, in addition to the canon cast of characters, resulting in a cast of dozens of characters.

Cooler Rising, by chapter thirty-five, is beginning to head into this. Given that this is based on Dragon Ball Z, this shouldn't be too surprising though.

Weiss Reacts could also qualify. It includes the entire cast of RWBY, characters from Persona 3, Persona 4, Fate/stay night, Code Geass and various assorted series — and that's not even going into the vast amount of OC stand-ins used for parents, teachers and Jaune's siblings. It's sister fic, Diary of Glynda Goodwitch, also adds to the amount of characters present. The Reactsverse overall contains characters from the above, Lucina Reacts and other spinoffs and fanfics set in the same universe.

My Little Pony: Rock Is Magic has many recurring characters, to the point that there is not an obvious main character. (It is usually Light My Fire or Hotel California).

The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fic All-American Girl involves not only the protagonist Americanized pony Sandalwood/Daisy Jo "DJ" Martinez and her adopted human family, but also her childhood friends, her husband and children, her other friends and allies, The Mane Six, the princesses, other cannon characters, the husbands and children of all the cannon characters, and countless other original pony, human, griffin, and changeling characters, from all walks of life. Many of which, either get a POV at some point or their on story in the "Be Human Side Stories".

Make Your Move has had over a thousand movesets for a thousand characters — and counting.

Films — Animation

Disney's101 Dalmatians. As well as the obvious titular canines, there are about a dozen characters who only appear for a scene or two.

Toy Story 3 adds a boatload of new characters to the still-present cast from the first and second movies. Several of its movie posters (for example, this one) boast this trope.

Speaking of Pixar, the die-cast toyline based on their animated film Cars actually consists of toy versions of every single character from the movie!

While the Disney Princess franchise (which is also Disney's biggest and most profitable franchise ever) includes only thirteen princess characters (with some exceptions, however), the Disney villain franchise on the other hand, actually includes the most characters of any Disney franchise ever made!

While The Lion King movies themselves have a decent range of characters, the extended universe (comics, books, etc) adds several dozen characters to the roster. That's ignoring all the unnamed Outsiders and Pridelanders as well.

The Force Awakens continues this tradition and has even more than the prequels. There's Finn, Rey, Poe Dameron, BB-8, Maz Kanata aligned with the Resistance. Then there's the villains; Kylo Ren, General Hux, Captain Phasma, General Snoke of the First Order. Add that to the characters from the original movies; Han, Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2D2 and Luke. That's 15, and that's not counting the actors in unspecified roles, which makes 25.

The film Cradle Will Fall was a traffic jam of different characters and groups of characters, with very few clues given.

While Nashville has 24 principal characters, director Robert Altman once pointed out that the film's real "main character" is not a person, but the city of Nashville itself.

A lot of Altman's movies are like this. The DVD cover of Short Cuts has 22 cast members listed above the title.

Richard Linklater's episodic, non-linear Slice of Life film Slacker has over a hundred nameless credited roles, none of whom appear more than once, and none who really take precedence over the others.

His follow-up, the Coming of Age story Dazed and Confused, had somewhere from 20 to 30 named characters, all of which appear with some frequency over the course of the film. Aside from the few specific leads, though, they're fortunately shuffled into Cast Herds.

Recount, an HBO Made-for-TV Movie about the 2000 US presidential election, has many characters on both sides, with the Democrats being led by Kevin Spacey and Dennis Leary (with help from Winston Smith). Oh, and they're all based on real people. Tom Wilkinson leads the Republicans.

Tombstone has 85 speaking roles (averaging one new character every 90 seconds). It follows the band of good guys, the band of bad guys, the good guys' wives, and the townsfolk, developing characters in all of these roles.

It has been said that the Spider-Man Trilogy movies have way too many characters that just aren't developed, or are thrown away without a word. Mary Jane's astronaut fiancee, the girl living next door to Peter, Gwen Stacy, Eddie Brock, etc. MJ's "astronaut boyfriend" is especially notable, seeing as how he's J. Jonah Jameson's son, and the actor who played him arguably buoyed the "Peter Parker" segments of the first two films.

The Back to the Future trilogy has a lot of supporting characters sprinkled throughout the various years. Granted, most of the major supporting characters are family or ancestors of Marty or Biff, but there were a LOT of minor supporting characters, and more than one were a Chekhov's Gunman. The list becomes bigger when you consider the animated series and the video game. The fan wiki has a list that's still growing to this day.

Casablanca, despite revolving around three leads, has a large cast of characters. It has 22 speaking parts, many of whom play some kind of significant role in the plot (or get at least one moment in the limelight).

The film Love Actually revolves around a cast of nearly 20 characters to a greater or lesser degree. The original and arguably best ensemble movie that inspired similar movies such as New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day.

The original run of The Pink Panther films consists of nine movies and many characters who make multiple appearances. The original protagonist, Gentleman Thief Sir Charles Lytton, and his associates were overshadowed by Breakout Character Inspector Clouseau, and Clouseau was given his own set of allies and enemies in the second film (A Shot in the Dark). While only three characters — Clouseau, Dreyfus, and Cato — make seven or more onscreen appearances, there are quite a few who turn up two to six times. There are also a significant number of important one-shot characters, which include the protagonists of films seven through nine.

Not only is X-Men: Days of Future Past a team movie, but one with X-Men teams from the future and the past, making the cast almost twice the size of a normal X-Men film.

X-Men: Apocalypse impressively manages to rival Days of Future Past. You got the X-Men, the various students, the humans, unaffiliated mutants, a brief but memorable appearance from Wolverine, The Four Horsemen, and of course, Apocalypse.

The character index on this site has thirty six subpages divided between three subgroups, plus an index to help you find which subpage you're looking for

The Disney Channel Original Movie Descendants features the offspring of Disney characters, both good and evil, as well as appearances by their parents.

Manhwa & Manhua

In the manhwa Faeries' Landing, there's Fanta and the other faeries, then the gods and creatures in the faerie realm, then Ryang, his family, friends, classmates, and other human extras, and the 108 pairs of affinities. And all the characters from the past and the present...

Only few people were able to keep track of exactly how many different band members Laibach had until now. The fact that the active band members change regularly and often use pseudonyms or don't use any individual names at all makes it worse. Intentionally. The list on the Wikipedia article seems to be complete though.

Menudo definitely has them. The band has been around since 1977, and members are thrown out and replaced when they turn 16, their voice changes, the start to shave, or get too tall. This has led to a revolving door of singers.

Vocaloid, if we include unreleased Vocaloids and private voicebanks, and don't include Append, Extend, V3 Updates, fanmades like Haku & Neru, or things like Ice Mountain and Vocaloid:China Project, there are 43.

GAGGLE, an all female "alt-choir" has between 20-25 members at any one time.

As The Polyphonic Spree is basically a small indie rock orchestra with a choir of varying size on vocals, the sheer number of people it brings onstage is one of its trademarks.

Film and TV soundtrack albums are no stranger to this trope.

The soundtrack album of Furious 7 features a whopping 31 artists, consisting primarily of rappers, DJs, latin artists, and pop singers. This is mainly because a lot of the artists collaborated with one another.

The Pirate Radio soundtrack has almost as many as Furious 7, with 29 artists featured over two discs.

The Ocean has had over 50 people working on their projects. So many people have worked that the website even admits to giving up listing everyone who has been involved.

Pinballs

Stern Pinball's X-Men has one of the largest casts in a Pinball game, with nearly fifty characters making appearances, many of them voiced.

Pro Wrestling

In 1980s WWF was the result of Vince McMahon Jr crushing or buying out most of the visible promotions of USA and Canada while signing the talent he wanted most. Only a portion of the entire roster was featured each week. Usually, two tag teams and four singles wrestlers would be spotlighted (often, evenly divided between faces and heels), and even with backstage interviews (pre-filmed interviews, frequently promoting an upcoming card in the viewing area) and segments such as "Piper's Pit", there still wouldn't be enough time in a 60-minute program to give camera time to, much less even mention, every wrestler in the promotion every week. If 50 percent of a promotion (of 50-60 headline-type wrestlers, not including those who were strictly jobbers) were featured each week, they did well.

The annual Royal Rumble Match (held the last Sunday of January every year) is a good way to bring all these characters together. Thirty (forty in 2011, and twenty when it began in 1988) wrestlers compete in the match over the course of about an hour, and typically only about ten of them will be recognizable to casual fans. Even WWE diehards may have trouble keeping track of all the cameos. Remember Daniel Puder? Probably not - but if you're a Royal Rumble connoisseur, you do.

In 1987, Jim Crockett Promotions took over/bought (Nobody seems to know which is the absolute truth) Championship Wrestling from Florida and bought the Universal Wrestling Federation. This gave them four more hours of TV to fill each week. While there were three distinct and separate crews, wrestlers would move over constantly. Late in the year, the UWF shows stopped having their own crews while CWF kept losing importance. At the end of the year, the UWF shows were the same as the JCP shows with different names/intros (UWF was the same as NWA Pro Wrestling and Power Pro Wrestling was the same as NWA World Wide Wrestling. The announcers would only mention "The Wrestling Network" during the shows.), while CWF's B-show (Southern Pro Wrestling) was cancelled and CWF became a NWA Pro Wrestling with localized commentary and a different name/intro. UWF disappeared as 1988 started, PPW disappeared a few weeks later, and CWF stuck around for a few more months.

Part of WCW's grand "Kill The WWF in Five Years" plan was to hire as many quality wrestlers as possible- veterans, foreign stars, up-and-comers and indy standouts alike. The problem was that this was mainly done to severely limit the WWF's available talent pool and WCW, who had only a 2-3 hour show, had no intention of using most of these people. Wrestlers were paid not based on whether they were booked for matches, but if they showed up to tapings, and even then, all a performer had to do was sign a register and he was given a full payday no questions asked, regardless of whether he had actually worked that night or not. This left WCW with a bloated roster, many of whom were getting paid for doing nothing, and who often resented the fact that they weren't being used, and willingly took a paycut to jump to WWF where they were actually shown on TV as soon as their contracts expired. This was one of the lesser poor management decisions that lead to The Death of WCW.

The nWo, by necessity of it being a group meant to takeover WCW. However, this became a problem when the angle was extended much longer than originally planned and keeping up with all the nWo members became a chore.

Radio

The Archers - thanks in part to its Extreme Long Runner status - has a regular character list of about 60, with a couple of dozen appearing each week. Include occasional and silent characters, and you're into the hundreds.

The Goon Show had three main cast members, a handful of supporting players (which included the announcer and some of the regular musicians) and a few recurring guest stars. Between them they played something like fifty roles, over thirty of them regulars. The bulk of these were voiced by Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, though Milligan claimed he only had so many parts to prevent Sellers from talking to himself.

The cast of The Session on The Brewing Network expanded over time to include a stable group of regulars, as well as a much larger group of people who regularly appear in episodes. Add on regular listeners who call and contribute, plus the stable of hosts of the various shows that got added after The Session

Myths & Religion

Epics and holy scriptures tend to be this, due to them having been collected from stories told for eons.

The ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, part literature and part mythology, defined Loads And Loads Of Characters for possibly the first time ever, and then redefined it just for fun. For most of the story, it's just the five heroes and their wife having wacky adventures. In the final year of the story, the cast suddenly balloons as the heroes are boarded up with a royal family, which naturally includes the extended family and several orders' staff and servants, all named. Then you get to The War Sequence, and it's the main heroes, miscellaneous friends and political allies, their extended families, and sons and nephews in the double digits each, against the enemy force of one hundred named villains and their allies, cousins, sons and nephews. This is just the named characters — mooks are in the thousands. And each named character gets his own story. This, kids, is why the Mahabharata is the longest poem ever written by an incredibly wide margin.

Also the Ramayana. The main story is about Rama. It starts before his conception and ends with his ascension to his celestrail abode. Its characters include His father, his wife, his wife's parents, his father's three wives, their offspring, their offspring's wives, their wives' parents, the respective households, Rama's teacher Valmiki, Hanuman, the other monkeys, some eagles, Ravana, Ravana's offspring and other related people in the households, Rama's two children etc. There are a lot more, but you get the idea.

The Bible. Each book has a whole new array of characters, and it even goes into their family trees for a bunch of generations. Several characters have multiple children who then have their own children. Several of those books were religious history texts, covering religious, political, and cultural events relevant to not only a nation, but several generations of that nation. Add to that the New Testament, made up primarily of letters to entire churches...

It should be noted that the Bible isn't a single book written by one author, but a collection of scriptures written by multiple authors throughout several generations.

The Crucible has about twenty parts, all of which are given, if not deep character development, then something to do at least.

Most Cirque du Soleil shows have at least fifty performers apiece; a few of the non-touring shows have upwards of 70. This can roughly be broken down into:

5-10 principal characters and/or character groups, including clowns, singers, and lead dancers.

Characters and/or groups that exist for one act in particular, but might have a member or two appear elsewhere in the show (i.e. the Zebras in "O", the Nymphs in Alegria) for character work. Acting for Two applies here.

The musicians.

Many William Shakespeare plays have dozens of named characters, particularly the histories. Often modern productions cut the plays down (since uncut most would last over four hours), merge bit parts with one or two lines into single characters, and double- or even triple-cast actors in medium and sometimes even larger characters.

Twilight: Los Angeles is a docudrama that tells the story of the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Lot of people.

The Blue Bird has a fairy give two children eight sidekicks for their journey, into lands with even more named characters — ranging from the kids' dead grandparents to Night to a forest's worth of tree spirits to Luxuries and Happinesses to unborn children waiting to go to Earth. Tellingly, lesser sidekick characters like Water are sidelined for significant stretches of the action.

Between the main 3 engines, Poppa, Electra's components, the coaches, the freight trucks, the Rockies/Hip-Hoppers and the national engines (and Greaseball's lackies, the race marshalls and Control), Starlight Express has a rather sizeable cast.

Into the Woods has approximately 20 to 24 characters depending on the production that have at least a few lines or non-ensemble singing duties.

The Transformers Generation 1 and Generation 2 comics are notable for featuring somewhere in the region of 300 named characters over the course of their ten-year run. Of these, over 120 are permanently killed off, some for dramatic effect to drive the story, but mostly because there were simply too many of them for the writer to keep track of, and because their toys had come off the shelf and no longer needed to be "sold" through the comic. They often went out in large batches (for instance, in issue #19, Omega Supreme offlines nearly every Decepticon from the first year of the series in about two pages), with the most famous instance surely being issue #50, in which a cosmically-powered Starscream unceremoniously kills almost every other surviving character from the first three years of the series with a few waves of his hands. This is without even bringing up the unnamed background characters, such as the entire population of San Francisco.

Transformers Armada had a relatively small cast. However, the sequel series Transformers Energon went so overboard in cramming in Autobot characters and using them at any excuse that in certain shots you can't actually tell what's going on. Needless to say, this left all but a few with no characterization at all. This got better in Transformers Cybertron, which mayor may not be a followup to Energon, but it didn't improve by that much.

Supposedly the reason for the many accents that the characters of Transformers: Cybertron was that they were so underdeveloped that otherwise they were virtually the same beyond their names and appearances.

G.I. Joe is Hasbro's second Merchandise-Driven franchise. Since the franchise was revived in 1982, the action figure lines have featured countless characters, most of whom have appeared in the various TV shows, movies and comics at some point.

My Little Pony is third (Boy, Hasbro's actually really good at creating franchises with Loads And Loads Of Characters). My Little Pony has a huge cast of primary, secondary, tertiary, and background characters, spread across 4 generations of toys and shows. Heck, Generation 3 My Little Pony's television show had no plot, continuity, or Canon—it was just a Merchandising ploy that just introduced more and more and more characters per episode. Thankfully, Generation fourMy Little Pony's TV Show doesn't fall into this snarl, but GOOD CELESTIA, there's a lot of characters—case in point, just look at its Ensemble Darkhorse Page, which, so far, is the only other case of Ensemble Dark Horse having its own page for a franchise—the other page, of course, being the one for Transformers.

BIONICLE, definitely. The main cast comprises over 200 characters, and there are countless Red Shirt villagers scattered all throughout the islands that the story hasn't covered.

According to the comics and stories, some of those Faceless Mooks were also sentient.

The Japanese stationery company Sanrio note Best known for creating Hello Kitty, has been in business since 1962note It wasn't until 1974, when they started creating characters.. Ever since the creation of Hello Kitty in 1974, the company decided to create more and more characters to see how successful they would sell in stores. While some characters are hardly ever heard of outside of Japanor sometimes forgotten. Some characters in Sanrio note Such as My Melody,Cinnamoroll and recently Wish Me Mell might end up become very popular characters in the company. The Japanese websiteand American website for Sanrio has a list of how many characters they have, mostly the popular and successful ones.

As of 2014, Sanrio has a total of 400 characters!

Monster High has a designated main cast, and nearly 100 other supporting characters who appear with varying frequency.

Uglydolls have a giant variety of characters in the line, even out of the core main ones.

At Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, there are days when the managers all dress in character costumes for a day. The sheer number of "forgotten" major characters is mind-boggling, and the fact that they usually have characters left over is simply jaw-dropping.

Web Animation

Homestar Runner has a relatively small core cast (twelve main characters), but add in all the spin-offs that are counted as part of the series' world and the list of recurring characters alone pushes triple digits. Some of these characters are a pop-corn mixer, a printer or a wagon full of pancakes. Not anthropomorphized. Just a regular popcorn maker named Frank Benedetto.

Broken Saints features about 40 speaking roles, over half of which are major players in the plot.

By the end of the first season, Red vs. Blue's core cast included thirteen characters (Church, Tucker, Caboose, Sheila, Tex, Grif, Sarge, Simmons, Lopez, Donut, Vic, and O'Malley), and it's only grown from there, until now the cast also includes eight Freelancers (Wyoming, York, Wash, South, North, Maine, CT, and Carolina), five AIs (Gamma, Epsilon (who replaced Church in the main cast), Delta, Sigma, and Theta), three important Freelancer personnel (the Director, the Counselor, and the Pilot), two significant aliens (Crunchbite and Junior), and other members of the Reds and Blues (Captain Flowers, Sister, Doc, and Andy the Bomb), not counting more minor characters such as the Green Alien or "imaginary" versions of characters from Caboose's mind or the capture unit.

YouTube Poop is this with various random characters appearing out of nowhere.

RWBY features over 30 named characters by the end of Volume 2, almost all of whom are integral to the plot in some manner. The Vol.2 finale is almost entirely dedicated to showing as many of them kicking ass as possible, and even manages to introduce three more characters in the process (four, if you count Adam).

8-Bit Theater has the Light Warriors, the Real Light Warriors, the Dark Warriors, the Elemental Fiends, the Other Warriors, White Mage and Black Belt, Onion Kid, Akbar and Jeff, King Steve, Princess Sara, Left-Hand Man Gary, Matoya, Bahamut, Dragoon, Sarda, The Trickster God, Dr. Swordopolis, Dodecahedron, Darko the Dark God of the Dark, Chaos, and more. For added goodness, two strips showed the Light Warriors, the Dark Warriors, the Other Warriors, and Warmechall on panel at once. The Light Warriors, Real Light Warriors, Dark Warriors, Elemental Fiends, and Other Warriors are each made up of 4 characters. So that's a total of 37 listed here, and there's more supporting cast than that.

Arthur, King of Time and Space. Arthurian myth, being made of various legends and ballads bolted together by Malory, has Loads And Loads Of Characters and AKOTAS includes most of them. (And the others are probably due to be introduced later.) Lampshaded here

Baskets of Guts: Starting off with two protagonists, the number of characters involved in the story dramatically increases, after said pair reaches the city.

Buildingverse works tend to have a massive cast, or to be precise a limited main castnote Girls Next Door: Sarah, Christine, Erik, Jareth; Roommates: Erik, Jareth, Javert, James; Superintendent: Javert, Valjean; etc. which inflates over 20 with all the regulars and to ridicculous levels with everybody (The character page for Roommates lists more than 100 characters).

The cast page for Captain SNES: The Game Masta lists 120 named characters - and it's incomplete. Including four different Links and the Nintendo Censorship Angel. And along the same lines, how bout we introduce Kid Radd here as well? Tons of bit parts (hah) who were nonetheless named, or at least referenced in such a way as to make them notable...

Consolers is a comic about game companies. Every game company (and even a few non-game companies) has a potential personification in this comic, and there's almost 25 of them so far.

In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures , even the artist has admitted that there are too many characters to keep up with, with at least one of the main characters in the beginning being moved to nearly invisible.

Deep Rise Over 25 named non-humans identified by color, hard-to-remember names and eye-configuration.

Drowtales. There are several noble houses, each with its leader, officers, counsellors and soldiers. There is the imperial house - ditto. There are the demon-busting Templars - ditto. There are the renegades and diabolists - ditto. There is the great school, with its staff and pupils. There are Ariel's friends (where not previously covered). And that doesn't even start on the supporting characters, citizens and walk-ons. Plus, they all have long, straight white hair and narrow builds. There is a very good reason why the drow in this universe favour distinctive jewellery, facial decals, and hair dye patterns...

In later chapters, the creators have started adding cameo appearances for fanmade characters, further expanding the named cast. Some of the "cameos" went on to become fairly important characters.

Dumbing of Age, while a less extreme example, actually uses this as an advertising point: one of the banner ads for the comic reads "Dumbing of Age has too many characters". As an Ultimate Universe of the entire Walkyverse, this was inevitable.

Everyday Heroes has a cast page that lists twelve major characters, plus a couple of dozen minors, not including one-episode appearances.

Girl Genius, between the Circus, Castle Wulfenbach, Sturmhalten, Beetleburg, Mechanicsburg, the Knights of Jove, the Jägers, and the assorted wandering types... let's just say there are a big damn lot of people who go in and out of the story.

Kaja Foglio has stopped trying to maintain a big character bio page, and now just deletes the old page and starts from scratch at the beginning of each chapter, adding in characters as they become relevant. Only 10 pages into chapter 9, there's already seventeen characters up there, and that's not including the "Old Heterodynes" (included on the page for generic backstory) and the author-insert bit characters. Ten pages of comic. Seventeen characters.

Greystone Inn started out with just a few core characters, but quickly expanded, with minor characters getting plotlines that would last for weeks. When the original main characters started getting less and less time, the strip gave way to Evil Inc..

Homestuck's provides around 26 main charactersnote John, Rose, Dave, Jade, Nanna, Mom Lalonde, Bro Strider, Grandpa, WV, PM, Jack, the 12 trolls, and two Walking Spoilers, which seems underwhelming until Alternate Universe and Bad Future triple that count. The sheer quantity eventually forces focus to be split by Geodesic Cast, spending whole Acts focusing on one group while everyone else is relegated to sporadic Intermissions. A full list, including the host of minor characters, can be found here.

The current count tips the scales at over 95 recurring characters. Even with much of the cast above having been Killed Off for Real.

And now, after John averted the Game Over Timeline,, there are two sets of at least 12 different major characters. note Namely: Rose, Dave, Jade, Karkat, Terezi, Kanaya, Gamzee, Vriska, Tavros, Jane, Dirk, and Jake. These can surely be handled as separate characters, since the differences in their respective timelines go back to three entire years.

Lackadaisy currently features 28 characters, and that's just the ones listed on the website's biography page. There are dozens of named characters with speaking roles in the comic beside the main 28 and Tracy has hinted that there are at least a couple more major players yet to be introduced.

Last Res0rt has at least 20 "main" characters to keep up with (12 criminals + 4 volunteers + 4 members of the Vaeo Family), and staff and various other family members associated with them. The main justification? It's a Reality Show — which, in the tradition of most shows, has a huge cast (to start) and then settles down into more important Characters. There's also a few clans starting to emerge, which increase the numbers further.

New characters are introduced at a positively frightening rate in Magical Misfits. To be fair, they are usually given distinctive backstories, but it does somewhat lead to a Kudzu Plot.

A Magical Roommate: Aylia is sent to college by her parents, mocked by her sister, and one roommate is replaced every semester. This doesn't account for even a quarter of the cast. Everybody in this strip has a name and personality, and blood relation with each other. Only the one in the first panel is part of the core cast.

Mountain Time is an interesting example. About half the strips don't have any recurring characters. The other half, however, draws from a cast of characters much larger than the 25 or so listed on the Characters page.

N Fans The Series had practically an army of characters. Yes, they were all Self Inserts, but they actually played the trope rather well since most of them weren't afraid to have some pretty bad things happen to them. Sadly, because the plot fixated on a couple, at least half the cast was Put on a Bus or removed from the comic after getting very little screentime beyond their arcs. (Team Lalala was one of the worst, having been left on the same screen for almost a year of real time.)

The Order of the Stick. After the inclusion of notable Azure City paladins and Greysky City thieves, the author seems a little quicker to kill off any new faces. The characters pages for the webcomic on this wiki include 10 subpages so far.

Our Little Adventure is getting there, with over forty characters notable enough to get an entry in the character sheet section of the website.

Penny and Aggie has almost 30 characters on its cast page and regularly diverts attention from the two female leads to focus on them. Aggie in particular seems to have been demoted to supporting cast in her own comic.

Questionable Content has a massive cast, leading to many characters ending up overlooked much of the time. There's Marten and his roommates, as well as other people in the building, the Coffee of Doom workers, Deathmole, various people at the college where Marten works, and a few robots. As of #3090 I count 87, disregarding the unnamed (including several named characters' parents) and those who appear in only one strip. A looser count gets well over a hundred.

Red String has 8 main characters, which doesn't seem like a lot. However, there are almost thirty secondary and tertiary characters, all of whom get as much development as the author can realistically cram in. This means there are some chapters where main characters (the main main character Miharu, even) don't show up at all. Only 2 or 3 chapters so far—in 40 chapters—have included most of the main characters at once.

While the company grows, we mostly follow the Special Ops squad and the officers, and people die in combat. Sometimes, they also come back. Tagon, Petey, and especially Kevyn, who did so three or four times in one story arc.

Sluggy Freelance. Granted it has been running for ten years, but still it has well over 50 characters. At last count, 156 or so... according to this website. At least he's pretty good about keeping the size of the core cast to remotely sane proportions. A lot of those 156 characters have been dead or Put on a Bus for years. The official cast page lists 40 characters, give or take whether you think Daisy is really Scout Arael or not. And it's out of date, especially with all the Star Org Cameos in Volume Two... And sometimes they opt out (Doythaban, TT Kevyn, Der Trihs, Shep, Nick, LOTA, and a number just before the "Longshoreman" arc).

Sins. You've got the Seven Deadly Sins...that's not so bad. Then consider that all but two have been replaced. And some have been replaced twice. And then there's the Seven Holy Virtues, the golems, the Vices, the hosts... and Murdock.

Something*Positive The main cast isn't overly large for a webcomic, but once you get to the past main characters (Jhim, Kim, Monette) to the supporting cast (Cab, Berenger, Claire, Anna, Lisa, Celie, The Teddy-Bear Liberation Front Guy, etc), things get a little crazy. Made worse by the occasional recurrer that only appears a total of five times in six years (Davan's friend Andy), and the fact that often a year goes by between Jhim or Anna appearances.

Sunset Grill features an Ensemble Cast and the cast page has over 65+ characters. And nearly all of them are not background characters.

The Walkyverse: At the end of It's Walky! alone, there were 247 named or otherwise identifiable characters.

Wapsi Square used to have dozens of them, but now the main cast has been downsized (reducing best friends and significant others to bit parts) to just eight. And their multiple personalities and personal demons. Not bad for a comic that is mostly about Monica's bust :).

Wayward Sons: Over 30 characters, with more being introduced periodically.

The Word Weary features a cast of nine canonical main characters and many, many secondary characters who contribute to the plot.

The Gamer's Alliance has had dozens of players, each of whom has introduced a multitude of both player characters and NPCs over the course of several years.

B Zp B: Consider the fact that there are about 7-8 active players, and there have been plenty of other players so far. Now consider the fact that each has his own CAST of characters, complete with a Big Bad, or several Big Bads. Many of the characters are constantly interacting with each other. Otherwise, they separate into their own Cast Herds.

Warrior Cats RPG has had, over the course of its history, as many as 100,000 different characters.

We Are All Pokémon Trainers has nearly 30 players representing at least one human character, and that's without their Pokémon and other NPCs.

We Are Our Avatars, the longest running forum Role Playing Game, has so many characters (including one-shots, regulars, background characters, NPCs, and so on) that it could possibly rival many of the items on this page for cast size!

ZOOOO Ommx BIES started with more than thirty player characters. And while not many of them survived until the end, there were still lots of well characterized NPCs added.

Dino Attack RPG has had many, many characters. Just in the titular Dino Attack Team there are 241 characters. That's not counting the numerous villains, civilians, and official LEGO characters that appeared in the almost seven-and-a-half year story.

Campus Life, having been going on for around four or five years now, was bound to fall under this trope. As of adding this, there are no less than 20 main plot important characters, and who knows how many supporting characters.

BZPRPG: To be expected, with six years(and counting)and innumerable players.

Since Absit Omen's creation more than three years ago, no less than 707 characters have been created. While many are inactive, the currently active roster still includes more than a hundred at a time.

As expected with any semi-open RPG, Cirque des Reves has over 100 characters at almost any given time.

Destroy The Godmodder: has had hundreds of summons, many of which have little tid-bits here and there, and every last one is named, and many players do not deal well with losing them. The only thing that keeps the world update from being pages in length is the fact that few entities last more than a week or two. It gets even worse when you realize that you could technically include all of the other characters from the various universes that affect what is going on if you include off-screen characters, which all in all sends the character sheet into the thousands.

The Massive Multi-Fandom RPG is not called "massive" for nothing. Even if you ignore all the characters who only appeared in a couple of posts, at any given time there are a lot of more major characters taking part. By Season 3 the characters needed to be split into a number of separate groups to limit the number of characters a player needs keep track of.

Fluidanims' Rock Hard Gladiator program is filled with all sorts of stickmen, each with (mostly) different powers. Examples include Andre, a brute with a giant hammer, Umbrella, who has a Swiss Army Weapon umbrella, Tentionmaru, whose scarf transforms into a sword, and Fry, who fights with a frying pan.

Worm has a very large cast or superheroes, supervillains, ordinary people and giant monsters, each of which may get A Day in the Limelight thanks to the story's frequent interludes. The cast page ont the Worm site is massive.

The Chronicles Of Taras, for a Web Serial Novel with seventeen episodes, sure does had tons of characters even if so many of them are dying left and right. There's the core cast of eight, Mr. Taylor the Counselor, the Guards Johnson and Brown, Najis Rakkasiak, the Big Bad, and tons of other characters referenced in the series.

The Whateley Universe is still growing. There are something like 15 Canon authors, writing 20 or so protagonists. Then there are all the other main characters and friends (and enemies and teachers) at Superhero School Whateley Academy. There are supposed to be nearly 600 students, plus dozens of teachers, researchers, security officers, and so on. It seems like we've met about a third of them. Maybe more. Plus the families of the main characters, an assortment of heroes and villains outside the school, ... Since there are now something like 150 novels, novelettes, short stories, novel chapters, and vignettes, it isn't surprising that we've met hundreds of characters. So far. One fan put together a spreadsheet: the authors may have introduced or namechecked 80% of the roughly six hundred students currently at Whateley Academy. And we got to meet every new student who started in Winter Term.

The Global Guardians PBEM Universe, at its peak, had 132 active player characters, some 400 inactive or retired player characters, nearly 25 "starter characters" (that is, characters used to allow brand new players to quickly get their feet in the doors), and 10,232 named, fully-realized non-player characters once the supervillains, support staff, and returning normals were all tallied up.

Every season of Survival of the Fittest has a very large cast, with over one hundred students and several terrorists on top of that. One of the test runs had 200 students. By the end of a season only one student is left, but it's still a huge cast. Version 3 itself hit the two hundred mark, and that isn't even counting those who didn't get into the game or NPC characters. V4 has 276 students total playing in the game. Add to that terrorists, teachers, family members, friends, students not in the game....

AH.com: The Series. The AH.com has a crew of about twenty, as do the ships of many of their recurring villains and allies, and then there's all the people they might meet in this week's timeline. Usually an episode will only focus on five or six crewers and the others just get one or two lines each.

Tales of MU starts by introducing the two dozen girls that live on protagonist Mack's floor and goes from there.

The Bounty Hunter Inn topics at GameFAQs tend to have this, as except for the latest administrator everyone has at least one player character... and can introduce as much NPCs as needed. Thankfully, many of these go unheard of if their creator quits, unless they were deeply connected to the current Arc.

As Darwin's Soldiers is an online RP which has had eighteen writers across two forums, with no limit to the amount of characters a writer can control, this is a given.

The Salvation War. The number of characters you really need to keep track of is pretty reasonable, and helped by the large number of real life people, but the number of minor characters quickly goes off the charts. Not helping is that many of Hell's residents have absurdly long, complex names.

Trinton Chronicles has 5 main authors and 2 part-time authors; 15 main characters, 20-something secondary, and over 100 throw-away characters.

Fate/Nuovo Guerra is heading toward this way, what with the infinite servant, master and magus slots.

The Insane Quest: While the number of characters may not be as large as that or Darwin's Soldiers, it is still fairly sizable. Despite characters occasionally being Put on a Bus due to player inactivity, the core cast rarely dwindles below twenty, and nearly every seemingly minor NPC introduced by the GM is almost guaranteed to gain a more important role later on. The Character Sheet for the RP currently lists 56 characters and growing.

Inevitable in Chaos Fighters due to every new installment contains entirely new characters, save for a few recurring characters.

With each member having access to at least four characters, Marvels RPG has ended up with this.

The Gungan Council has had over 8,000 members, each creating at least one character, with many forever lost due to the site's transfer to Yuku and the ezHack. But that's just the entire site's twelve year history. At any one moment, the current number of characters per faction averages at at least 25 active at the time, not including lurkers, bumping the character count at the time to around 200.

We're Alive: Over a dozen main cast members who are often split into multiple storylines.

Being a universe made by dozens of writers, and including the entire world in that setting, Metamor Keep.

Fan Pro adds a new batch of characters every week, with at least 1000 total having been confirmed. One of the goals of the fandom is to break the world record for the largest amount of characters in a work.

Pyrrhic has 30 students as its basis for the experiment, but also a mysterious family seeking to save them, flashbacks showing the student's families, and the members of the Sons of the Constitution. All in all, considering it's not even halfway through, there may be more coming.

Re Evolution has a massive meta universe, with several dozen plot-relevant NPCs in the main universe alone. This is in addition to the 20+ player characters and their families and friends.

Pooh's Adventures... Well, not all the time, but most of the time, they'll want to cram every. Single. Character. The end result is making the movies twice as long, with the major contributor to the length being introduction sequences and villain arrivals and a cast list that's... Alright, you just have to see how long a cast list for this.

The Vinesauce Tomodachi Life has had around 70 islanders overall (for the record, Tomodachi Life has a hard cap of 100 Miis at a time), including characters from other fictional works, from in-jokes, from real life, and some original characters, with all being unique in some way. It's less daunting than it sounds, however, as only about 10-15 of them are consistently involved in the many plot threads and/or have a developed personality. Also, Vinny is actively making sure that the population doesn't grow out of control with various methods, including the assimilation arc, which eliminated more than a dozen of the least-memorable islanders. By the time the original run wraps up, the population of the island is less than 50.

Void Domain has a primary Point-Of-View cast of about ten characters. Then there are all the background and side characters and plenty of main characters who simply do not get point-of-view segments. The cast page tends to grow every handful of chapters.

Critical Role, as a live streamed Dungeons and Dragons campaign. There's the main party of eight - Vax, Vex, Pike, Grog, Percy, Tiberius, Keyleth and Scanlan. Then there are the guest players - Zahra, Lyra, Kashaw, Thorbir, Lilith, Kerrek, Gern, Garthok, and Shale - who appear for anywhere from one to four episodes each. Some party members have family, like the twins' father or Keyleth's father, and both Percy and Scanlan have family they don't know about at first. There are recurring allies (Gilmore, Kima, Clarota, Garmelie, Jarett, Allura, Seeker Asum, Sovereign Uriel), and because the party played for a few years before streaming, there are some allies the viewers might not be as familiar with. There are major and minor villains and their followers (K'varn, the Briarwoods, Saundor, Kevdak, Ripley). There are deceased characters (the twins' mother, the entire De Rolo family, and Mistress Asharu). There are named shopkeepers, clerics, major religious or political figures, bureaucrats, organizations, tavern-owners, pilots and assistants who might show up again at any time (Sherrie, Captain Damon, Viktor, Tyriok, Osysa, Keeper Yennin, the members of the Clasp, Vanessa, J'Mon Sa'Ord, Kynan). There are unnamed shopkeepers and swindlers (the Vasselheim potion merchant, the fortune-teller in Ank'Harel, the "spice dealers", the hat shop owner). There are friendly boss fights (Kern, Earthbreaker Grune, Kamaljiori). There are gods and almost-gods (The Raven Queen, Sarenrae, Vecna, Orcus, Artagan). There are demons (Orthax, Hotis, Yenk). And, of course, there are dragons (Brimscythe, Rimefang, Thordak, Raishan, Umbrasyl and Vorugal). There are dozens and dozens of named characters, and players and viewers alike are baffled as to how the Dungeon Master, Matt, keeps them all straight.

Real Life

At the moment, the total human cast of Real Life has just passed 7 billion. If you include all the humans who have died, the number goes up to (an estimated) 108 billion. Unfortunately, you can only maintain a stable, social relationship with around 150 of them at a given time. This is known as Dunbar's Number, or as Cracked calls it, the Monkeysphere. This fact, however, doesn't stop some people having a Facebook "friends list" several times that number; a source of minor contention for skeptics of social media.

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